The main subject and objective of this book are logical foundations of nonmonotonic reasoning. This bears a presumption that there is such a thing as a general theory of non monotonic reasoning, as opposed to a bunch of systems for such a reasoning existing in the literature. It also presumes that this kind of reasoning can be analyzed by logical tools (broadly understood), just as any other kind of reasoning.In order to achieve our goal, we will provide a common logical basis and semantic representation in which different kinds of non monotonic reasoning can be interpreted and studied. The suggested framework will subsume basic forms of nonmonotonic inference, including not only the usual skeptical one, but also various forms of credulous (brave) and defeasible reasoning, as well as some new kinds such as contraction inference relations that express relative independence of pieces of data. In addition, the same framework will serve as a basis for a general theory of belief change which, among other things, will allow us to unify the main approaches to belief change existing in the literature, as well as to provide a constructive view of the semantic representation used.This book is a monograph rather than a textbook, with all its advantages (mainly for the author) and shortcomings (for the reader). It is primarily intended for specialists in Artificial Intelligence and Knowledge Representation who are interested in having versatile tools for describing commonsense reasoning tasks, as well as in knowing representation capabilities of such tools. It also could be of interest to general logicians; our study demonstrates, after all, that nonmonotonic reasoning is just a special kind of logical reasoning that can and should reach the level of sophistication common to established logical formalisms.
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